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• Posted May 1, 2026

Common Knee Surgery Doesn't Help, Might Actually Make Things Worse, Clinical Trial Reports

One of the world’s most common knee surgeries doesn’t help patients, and might even make matters worse, a new study says.

A torn meniscus — the cartilage inside a knee — can cause pain, swelling and difficulty moving the joint.

As a treatment, doctors sometimes remove part of the damaged meniscus, a procedure called partial meniscectomy.

But this procedure doesn’t improve people’s knee pain or function long-term, and can in fact cause increased progression of arthritis, researchers reported April 29 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Our findings suggest that this may be an example of what is known as a medical reversal, where broadly used therapy proves ineffective or even harmful,” senior researcher Dr. Teppo Jarvinen said in a news release. He’s a professor of surgery at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

These results come from a 10-year follow-up of a Finnish study of nearly 150 people with a torn meniscus. Half the patients underwent a partial meniscectomy, and the other half a fake surgery.

After a decade, researchers found no real benefit from the surgery.

Indeed, people who got the surgery appeared to have an increased risk of having worse knee arthritis or even needing knee replacement surgery.

For example, about 81% of the patients who received a partial meniscectomy had significant progression of knee arthritis, compared to 70% of those who got the sham surgery, follow-up X-rays revealed.

“The surgery is based on the assumption that pain in the inside of the knee is caused by a medial meniscus tear, which can be treated surgically," said researcher Dr. Raine Sihvonen, a specialist in orthopedics and traumatology at Pihlajalinna Kelloportti Hospital in Tampere, Finland.

“Such reasoning — assumption based on biological credibility — is still very common in medicine but in this case, the assumption does not withstand critical examination,” Shivonen said in a news release. “Based on current understanding, pain in various joints, such as the knee joint in this case, is related to degeneration brought about by aging.”

These results add to other randomized studies that have demonstrated that partial meniscectomy is of little value, said lead researcher Dr. Roope Kalske, a specialist in orthopedics and traumatology at the University of Helsinki.

For nearly a decade, many independent, non-orthopedic organizations providing clinical guidelines have recommended that the procedure should be discontinued, one researcher noted.

“Still, for example, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) and the British Association for Surgery of the Knee (BASK) have continued to endorse the surgery," Järvinen said. "This effectively illustrates how difficult it is to give up inefficient therapies.”

Harvard Medical School lists a number of non-surgical treatment options for a torn meniscus, including:

• Physical therapy

• Resting the knee

• Icing and elevating the knee

• Wearing a knee brace

• Taking over-the-counter pain medications

More information

Harvard Medical School has more about meniscus tears.

SOURCES: University of Helsinki, news release, April 29, 2026; The New England Journal of Medicine, April 29, 2026